I often refer to my method of creating graphs as "brute force Excel," meaning that you can make almost anything work in Excel, but it sometimes means getting a little creative. The method described in this post can be considered a prime example of brute force Excel, where I walk through the steps for turning tabular data into a value plotted visually within a range.

It seems that I have a distaste for any chart type that has food in its title. My hatred of pie charts is well documented. Donuts are even worse. Here's another to add to the list: the spaghetti graph. They look like someone took a handful of uncooked spaghetti noodles and threw them on the ground. There are a few strategies for taking the would-be-spaghetti graph and creating more visual sense of the data. I'll explore three such strategies here.